The dream of the Android PC lives. At Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 demo event in New York, one of the chipmaker's more surprising products was a little streaming stick and a dock that, together, connect your phone to a TV or turn it into a desktop computer.

The gadget is a proof of concept; it doesn't even have a name. But as you can see in the photo, it's a dock that connects wirelessly to your phone or tablet, with two USB ports, an audio out and an HDMI port - just enough to connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Qualcomm showed someone editing a document in WPS Office on the monitor.

The point of the demo, really, was to show off Qualcomm's 802.11ac and new 802.11ad streaming capabilities. The new 802.11ad standard, formerly known as WiGig, is a short-distance, high-speed protocol that uses the 60GHz band. It should solve the stuttering and network congestion problems we've seen with Qualcomm's Wi-Fi-based Miracast and Apple's AirPlay streaming.

But ultimately, Qualcomm's demos just showed me how Android software is still tracking behind Qualcomm's hardware. That makes sense; after all, the technologies we saw at this demo probably won't hit the market until late 2015.

Take the "Android desktop PC," streaming its apps and content from a tablet. It was running WPS Office, which isn't bad for light-duty editing, but let me say, it's no Microsoft Office. It doesn't try to be Microsoft Office, but it also doesn't try to be your sole office application. As we've seen on PCs such as the HP Slate 21, if you're expecting a full desktop computing experience, Android's third-party applications often don't quite cut it.

Meanwhile, over on another screen, someone was trying to stream 4K video over 802.11ad to a TV from a tablet running Qualcomm's 64-bit Snapdragon 810 processor. Really, all the specs say that this should have been smooth as silk. But the demo kept stuttering and occasionally crashing. The culprit, Qualcomm said, was the XBMC video playback software running on the tablet.

I've seen mobile computing firms trying to replace the desktop PC for 10 years now. (Anyone remember 2011's Motorola Atrix, which turned into a Linux-powered laptop?) By making wireless streaming quick and easy, Qualcomm is solving one of the problems involved, but the challenge still has a ways to go.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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